Power Line

.+Add.Feed Info1000FOLLOWERS

Powerlineblog.com is a hugely popular conservative blog run by a team of distinguished lawyers and academics – John H. Hinderaker, Scott W. Johnson, Paul Mirengoff and Steven Hayward. If you are looking for a passionate and incisive commentary on US politics, this is the place to be.

Senator Tom Cotton will introduce legislation next week to combat the opioid epidemic in America. The proposal will impose penalties for fentanyl distribution and trafficking that better reflect the severity of the crime. It will also provide resources to the Post Office to stop shipments of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids arriving from overseas.

Fentanyl, a fully synthetic opioid, is 100 times more powerful than morphine. Dumped into the U.S. by China, it has been a driving force behind our opioid epidemic. Sen. Cotton says that more than 20,000 Americans were killed by fentanyl last year.

Cotton’s bill is intended to make sure the punishment for fentanyl distribution and trafficking fits the crime. It reduces the amount of fentanyl required for mandatory sentencing minimums to apply in distribution cases.

Previously, to obtain the stiffest punishment, a dealer needed to have 400 grams of fentanyl. Under the Cotton bill, they only need 20 grams. The weight requirements are reduced proportionately for lower offenses.

In addition, the legislation adds a new mandatory punishment of life in prison or the death penalty, if the dealer has 50 grams or more and someone dies from their fentanyl. The Supreme Court might well strike down imposition of the death penalty for dealing drugs. As presently constituted, it almost certainly would.

Sen. Cotton has a co-sponsor for this bill. He’s none other than Sen. Lindsey Graham.

Graham has supported legislation that would reduce mandatory minimums for certain federal drug crimes and allow the release from prison of some drug dealers who have not completed their sentences. Apparently, Graham wants to increase penalties for dealing fentanyl while reducing them for dealing other deadly drugs.

The opioid crisis, deadly as it is, should not obscure the fact that dealing controlled substances like cocaine and heroin can result in deaths. Those who deal these drugs deserve the mandatory minimum sentences currently in place.

In 2014, the Obama administration promulgated a “guidance” to America’s public schools that threatened federal investigations and litigation against schools where black students are disciplined (e.g., by suspension) more often, on a pro rata basis, than white students, on the ground that such numerical discrepancy is evidence of discrimination. Many schools responded by adopting discipline quotas, which meant in practice that after a certain number of students of a particular race had been suspended, teachers and administrators were helpless to enforce any kind of discipline in classrooms.

The Obama administration is gone, thankfully, but its “guidance” has not been revoked. Meanwhile, state governments and federal courts that are in liberal hands have taken up the claim that disparate incidence of discipline must be discriminatory, a theory that flies in the face of common observation that misbehavior in school is not randomly distributed in the student population.

In Minnesota, the Department of Human Rights has reportedly sent letters to 43 school districts and charter schools, telling them that they are under investigation because of racial disparities in discipline. There is an added Orwellian element in that news of the letters has leaked out, but no one knows what 43 school districts have gotten the letters, or what the letters say. Under Minnesota law, it apparently is difficult if not impossible for the public to get that information. So the far-left administration of trust fund billionaire Mark Dayton is able to bully school districts in the shadows, without public knowledge or recourse.

Brace yourself, parents of Minnesota. Here’s what’s coming soon to a school near you: increased violence, brazen challenges to teachers’ authority and a chaotic environment where learning is an uphill battle. Teachers who try to exert control will find their hands tied, and some kids — no longer accountable for their behavior — will feel free to provoke mischief and mayhem.

If this happens at your school, you’ll be able to thank the Minnesota Department of Human Rights (MDHR). In fall 2017, the department sent letters to 43 school districts and charter schools across the state, announcing that the schools are under investigation because their student discipline records suggest that black and Native American students are disciplined at a rate that exceeds their proportion of the student population.
***
Here, in essence, is MDHR’s position: The primary cause of racial discipline gaps in schools is racist teachers and discipline policies, not differing rates of student misconduct. Schools must move to end these statistical group disparities. If administrators don’t agree to change their practices in ways that reduce black and Native American discipline rates, according to MinnPost, “[Human Rights Commissioner Kevin] Lindsey says the state will initiate litigation.”

We’ve seen this movie before, most recently in the St. Paul Public Schools. There, it had devastating consequences for students of all backgrounds. MDHR bureaucrats must have been the only people in St. Paul who weren’t paying attention to this debacle.

In St. Paul schools — as virtually everywhere in the country — black students, as a group, are referred for discipline at higher rates than other students. Starting around 2012, the district’s leaders tried to narrow this gap by lowering behavior expectations and removing meaningful penalties for student misconduct. For example, they spent millions of dollars on “white privilege” training for teachers, and dropped “continual willful disobedience” as a suspendable offense.

Violence and disorder quickly escalated. In some schools, anarchic conditions made learning difficult, if not impossible, according to teachers. In December 2015, after a vicious attack by a student left a high school teacher with a traumatic brain injury, Ramsey County Attorney John Choi labeled the trend of violence a “public health crisis,” according to news accounts.

By that time, suspensions — which had initially fallen — had surged to their highest rate in five years. Black students, about 30 percent of the student body, were 77 percent of those suspended. The St. Paul teachers’ union threatened to strike over safety concerns, and families who valued education began flooding out of St. Paul schools. In June 2016, the school board voted out the superintendent.

Today, MDHR seems intent on duplicating this failed social experiment throughout Minnesota.

It’s a funny thing about liberals–they are undaunted by failure. It’s almost as though they don’t really care whether their policies work or not.

Kathy talks about the fact that the Minnesota Department of Human Rights’ power grab is being carried out in secrecy, and continues:

The fact is, public scrutiny is vital here, to expose the three deeply flawed premises on which MDHR’s race-focused discipline campaign is based.

The department’s first faulty premise is that teachers, not students, are to blame for the racial discipline gap. MDHR bureaucrats’ key (if unspoken) assumption is that students with widely different socioeconomic and family backgrounds — as groups — all misbehave in school at the same rate. Relying on this premise, the department attributes any significant group disparities to discriminatory teachers and discipline practices, by default.

But consider this: Nationally, white boys are suspended at more than twice the rate of Asian and Pacific Islander boys, while boys in general are suspended much more often than girls.

Is this because teachers are biased against white students and boys? Or does it reflect real differences in conduct?

Liberals who claim that disparate discipline rates must be evidence of racist teachers never want to talk about the fact that Asian students are suspended much less often than whites.

There are, in fact, real differences in group behavior. For example, nationally, young black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at 10 times the rate of whites and Hispanics of the same age. Behaviors that lead to criminal conduct are also likely to produce school misconduct. Tragically, black students’ discipline rate is most likely higher than other students’ because, on average, they misbehave more.

A groundbreaking 2014 study by J.P. Wright and colleagues in the Journal of Criminal Justice appears to confirm this. Using the largest sample of school-aged children in the nation, the authors found that teacher bias plays no role in the racial discipline gap, which is “completely accounted for by a measure of the prior problem behavior of the student.”

What accounts for group differences in behavior? A primary factor appears to be profound demographic differences in family structure. Nationally, about 72 percent of African-American and 66 percent of Native American children are born out of wedlock, as opposed to 29 percent and 17 percent of white and Asian children, respectively. Young people who grow up without fathers are far more likely than their peers to engage in antisocial behavior, as voluminous research makes clear.

These facts are well known, apparently to everyone except the Obama Department of Education and the Minnesota Department of Human Rights.

MDHR’s second flawed premise is that black students’ higher suspension rates give rise to a “school to prison pipeline,” which reduces their chances for future success. Lindsey told MinnPost that kids who miss school because of suspensions aren’t as likely as others to learn or graduate, and so are more likely to land in prison.

But the problem of missed school days goes far beyond days missed for suspensions. Chronic absenteeism, defined in Minnesota as missing more than 10 percent of school days, is linked with poverty and home conditions. In 2015-16, 37 percent of Native American and 21 percent of black students were chronically absent, compared with 11 percent and 8 percent of white and Asian students, respectively.

The whole “school to prison pipeline” myth is disingenuous. It shouldn’t be surprising that teenagers who bring weapons to school, get into fights, assault teachers, are chronically disobedient and disruptive, take drugs on school property, and so on, are disproportionately likely to commit crimes that land them in prison. Only a liberal could be surprised at this correlation.

MDHR’s third flawed premise is that discipline policies that focus more on race than on a student’s actual conduct somehow benefit poor and minority children.

In fact, the greatest victims of such policies are the children — many poor and minority — who come to school ready to learn. The classroom disorder these policies promote can add insurmountable obstacles to their quest for a decent education.

There is more to Kathy’s column, which you can read here. As you know, if you are a regular Power Line reader, I am now President of Center of the American Experiment, Minnesota’s pre-eminent conservative voice. If you would like to support the work of policy analysts like Katherine Kersten, and help us to reform a backward blue state, you can go here to donate. All contributions are appreciated!

Ron Klain is a longtime Democratic operative. Among other important posts, he served as chief of staff to two vice presidents, Al Gore and Joe Biden.

Klain is a personable guy. He was liked and respected by conservatives I know who dealt with him during the Clinton years.

These days, though, Klain is so committed to the anti-Trump resistance that guilt and innocence don’t matter to him anymore, at least not in disputes involving fellow anti-Trumpers. He makes that clear in a piece for the Washington Post called “I stand with Andrew McCabe.”

McCabe is the former deputy director of the FBI. Jeff Sessions fired him last week after the inspector general of Department of Justice found he was less than honest in statements he made to investigators, and after career DOJ employees then recommended his discharge.

Even Trump-hating Benjamin Wittes conceded it would be premature to conclude that McCabe’s discharge was improper. Indeed, Wittes went further, arguing that the offense McCabe was found to have committed warrants firing and that the DOJ process that produced his firing “carries a presumption of fairness and independence.”

Why, then, does Ron Klain stand with McCabe? It boils down to the fact that Klain hates Trump.

Here’s what he says:

[W]hat if McCabe did do something wrong in authorizing FBI officials to talk to a reporter, or while answering questions from investigators looking into the matter?. . .[T]he fact [is] that almost every person who stands up to Trump will, themselves, be imperfect, be vulnerable to investigation, have made mistakes — that is to say, human.

Klain is hiding the ball. McCabe’s problem isn’t that he’s imperfect and/or vulnerable to investigation, and it isn’t only that he authorized FBI officials to talk to a reporter. It appears that McCabe was dishonest with investigators, an offense that has led to criminal charges against former associates of Donald Trump and should lead to criminal charges against McCabe if the evidence supports them.

Klain continues:

In these instances, we need to ask not whether an individual did something wrong; the question is whether there is any reason to believe that is why Trump took action. In McCabe’s case, the answer is obvious.

What’s obvious is (1) Trump did not take action against McCabe, Jeff Sessions did and (2) Sessions’ action was supported by findings and recommendations of career DOJ employees with no ax to grind — a process that, as Wittes says, “carries a presumption of fairness of independence.”

In any case, why don’t we need to ask whether McCabe did something wrong? Why should we “stand” with wrongdoers just because we suspect they have been called out due to political antagonism?

Klain says we should do so because otherwise FBI personnel investigating Trump will receive a “chilling message”: If you do your job you will face unpleasant consequences. But this will only be the message if FBI agents who don’t commit fireable offenses are fired. That hasn’t happened if McCabe did what the inspector general says he did.

Moreover, Klain is too blinded by his hatred of Trump to consider what message would be sent by not firing a top level FBI man who doesn’t tell the truth to federal investigators. What message is sent by “standing by” such a man.

Using Klain’s logic, one could make a stronger case for standing by Michael Flynn than for standing by McCabe. Klain views McCabe as powerless in the face of Trump’s tweets.

Flynn was powerless when Sally Yates and Peter Strzok went after him, hoping to induce him to make a false statement. He was powerless when Robert Mueller, with something approaching unlimited power and resources, caused him to spend large amounts of money on legal fees, and targeted his son.

Some people I know are sure that Flynn was targeted because of his allegiance to Trump and his attacks on Hillary Clinton (at the GOP convention, Flynn ill-advisedly seemed to lead “lock her up” chants) — as sure as Klain is that McCabe’s firing is politically motivated. I strongly suspect they are right.

By Klain’s logic, we should stand with Flynn regardless of whether he made false statements to the FBI. I say we should stand with Flynn only if he did not make false statements.

When the merits don’t matter — when the only questions that need to be asked are whose side is one on, who benefits, and who has the superior claim to being “powerless” — our polity is in serious trouble.

A lot of the commentary about the McCabe firing concerns the fact that being fired Friday night means his pension, supposedly with a value of something like $1.7 million (not sure if that is some kind of net-present value figure or other basis), won’t fully vest, lending verisimilitude to the idea that the firing was a politically vindictive move by Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. (And keep in mind amidst the typical lousy reporting: McCabe isn’t losing all his pension benefits—he’ll still collect a pension, just a lesser amount.)

Here’s the thing: McCabe is 50 years old. (In fact, today is McCabe’s birthday, which is why he needed to last to today even though he was effectively fired by FBI director Wray several weeks ago. Happy birthday Andrew.) And he gets that kind of pension when he will undoubtedly go on to work in the private sector? But more to the point: if we moved public employees from defined-benefit pensions to defined contribution pensions (that is, 401Ks) like most everyone else in the private sector, McCabe would probably have an actual account balance in the same neighborhood that would belong to him, in which case it wouldn’t matter when or if he was fired because no one could take it away from him, and he wouldn’t had to serve out the clock to his 50th birthday or 20-year mark. And since 401K plans are largely transferrable, he could continue building it up at his next position in the private sector, or with another government agency.

It would be the height of irony if one unintended effect of the McCabe firing is adding some force behind efforts to reform public sector pensions at all levels.

I spent the end of last week in Washington DC with a hectic schedule of meetings and mischief, including, most importantly, doing a number of one-on-one interviews with great people for the Power Line podcast. Stay tuned for details as these roll out over the next two weeks.

And one of these podcast adventures was a return visit to Jonah Goldberg’s Remnant podcast, in which I joined with Jonah and Charles Murray to offer career and life advice to a live audience of overachieving young people. Jonah describes us as “a supergroup of curmudgeons.” I’ll take that. (One commenter has called it “Curmudgeonstock,” which I like ever better!)

This episode is quite long at one hour and forty-two minutes, but we’re getting a lot of good feedback about it. Here’s the Ricochet link.

As I have said a time or two before, Samantha Power made a name for herself with a book proclaiming our obligation to stop genocide abroad. Once she took office in the Obama administration, however, she became an apologist for Obama’s detachment from the catastrophe in Syria and his deal with the genocidal maniacs in Iran, among other things. It’s almost enough to make one question her bona fides, or even to suspect she may be a complete fraud.

No one has done justice to the phenomenon of Samantha Power. It might be the task of a lifetime. Seth Mandel nevertheless made a good start in the 2017 Commentary essay “The cautionary tale of Samantha Power.”

Power also played an untold role in the “unmasking” of Trump transition officials caught up in foreign surveillance. She has testified that certain of the “unmasking” requests were made by others using her name. Perhaps someday we’ll know the truth. She should be in the middle of an old-fashioned scandal. Is anyone on the case?

Yesterday Power took to Twitter to comment on the mad barking former CIA Director John Brennan. Lee Smith, incidentally, has demonstrated that Brennan is himself a protagonist in the underlying scandal. A reasonable reader might infer that she is aware of the hazard of exclusion from Brennan’s circle of love, or interpret it an advisory from one who knows.

Lest she be thought to have committed a Kinsley gaffe by accidentally intimating the truth — it’s not her style — Power tried to clear it all up.

Whoa! Just home & see much misinterp. of earlier tweet. It’s testament to polarized times that it cd be misread as referring to something other than Brennan’s indignation. So will translate: not a good idea to upset @JohnBrennan bc/ he will raise an angry (& eloquent) voice. https://t.co/YgIjeKGAlp

As I understand it, the core accusation that led to the firing of Andrew McCabe is that McCabe misled investigators about giving information to a former Wall Street Journal reporter regarding the investigation of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton family’s charitable foundation. In his post-firing statement, McCabe asserted that he not only had authority to “share” that information with the media, but did so with the knowledge of “the director.” The FBI director at the time was James Comey.

I chose to share with a reporter through my public affairs officer and a legal counselor. As deputy director, I was one of only a few people who had the authority to do that. It was not a secret, it took place over several days, and others, including the director, were aware of the interaction with the reporter.

(Emphasis added)

Maybe. But Jonathan Turley points out that if the “interaction” means leaking the information, then McCabe’s statement would seem to contradict statements Comey made in a May 2017 congressional hearing. Says Turley:

Asked if he had “ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation” or whether he had “ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation,” Comey replied “never” and “no.”. . .

McCabe appears to be suggesting that Comey was consulted before the alleged leak to the media on the Clinton investigation. Many of us had speculated that it seemed unlikely McCabe would take such a step without consulting with Comey. Yet, Comey repeatedly stated that he had never leaked nor caused anyone to leak information to the media.

Comey, by the way, is about to release his book, the title of which is “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership.” According to Turley, he has started selling tickets, for roughly $100 each, to attend the book tour events.

Suddenly, the title of Comey’s book seems apt. If McCabe’s statement about Comey’s leadership is the truth, then Comey’s testimony to Congress looks like a lie.

The firing of Andrew McCabe has heads exploding among members of the anti-Trump resistance. No surprise there.

However, at Lawfare, a resistance site, Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes say they are reserving judgment about the firing, and they caution others to do the same. “It is simply not clear at this stage whether or not the record will support his dismissal,” they say.

They are right. It isn’t clear, and won’t be until the full inspector general report on the Clinton email investigation, including information on McCabe’s conduct, is released.

However, there is a sound basis to form a tentative belief that the firing of McCabe was justified. That basis comes through in what Jurecic and Wittes write:

The FBI takes telling the truth extremely seriously: “lack of candor” from employees is a fireable offense—and people are fired for it. Moreover, it doesn’t take an outright lie to be dismissed. In one case, the bureau fired an agent after he initially gave an ambiguous statement to investigators as to how many times he had picked up his daughter from daycare in an FBI vehicle. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled against the agent when he appealed, finding that “lack of candor is established by showing that the FBI agent did not ‘respond fully and truthfully’ to the questions he was asked.”

So if McCabe was less than candid in answering questions, his firing was justified and consistent with FBI practice. Was he? We don’t know. But the finding that McCabe did not meet FBI standards for honesty was made by career Justice Department officials, not Jeff Sessions or other political appointees. As Jurecic and Wittes say:

[A]lthough Sessions made the ultimate call to fire McCabe, the public record shows that the process resulting in the FBI deputy director’s dismissal involved career Justice Department and FBI officials—rather than political appointees selected by President Trump—at crucial points along the way. To begin with, the charges against McCabe arose out of the broader Justice Department Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigation into the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation.

While the inspector general is appointed by the president, the current head of that office, Michael Horowitz, was appointed by President Barack Obama and is himself a former career Justice Department lawyer. As Jack Goldsmith has written, the inspector general has a great deal of statutory independence, which Horowitz has not hesitated to use: Most notably, he produced a highly critical 2012 report into the Justice Department’s “Fast and Furious” program. So a process that begins with Horowitz and his office carries a presumption of fairness and independence.

(Emphasis added)

Once Horowitz was done, other career DOJ officials were handed the baton — officials whose work should also be presumed fair and independent.

After investigating McCabe, Horowitz’s office provided a report on McCabe’s conduct to the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), which investigates allegations of misconduct against bureau employees. This office is headed by career Justice Department official Candace Will, whom then-FBI Director Robert Mueller appointed to lead the OPR in 2004. According to Sessions, the Office of Professional Responsibility agreed with Horowitz’s assessment that McCabe “lacked candor” in speaking to internal investigators.

Finally, Sessions’s statement references “the recommendation of the Department’s senior career official” in advocating McCabe’s firing on the basis of the OIG and OPR determinations. (The official in question appears to be Associate Deputy Attorney General Scott Schools.)

So while Sessions made the decision to dismiss McCabe, career officials or otherwise independent actors were involved in conducting the investigation into the deputy director and recommending his dismissal on multiple levels.

(Emphasis added)

Is it possible that a process conducted by career DOJ employees with no apparent ax to grind against McCabe reached the wrong conclusion, either on the facts or on the recommendation that should flow from the facts? Of course, it’s possible. Is it likely? I don’t think so.

In any event, the process Jurecic and Wittes describe is at odds with McCabe’s self-serving claims that his discharge was an attempt to harm the FBI or undermine the Mueller investigation. Neither the inspector general nor the career employees who made recommendations based on the inspector general’s findings could plausibly be said to want to harm the FBI or undermine Mueller.

McCabe is trying to shift the focus away from his conduct by casting himself as a victim of President Trump. He hopes that widespread hatred of Trump will enable him to pull this off. It’s good to know that at least one precinct of the resistance isn’t going along uncritically.

As the House Intelligence Committee has concluded, there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump Campaign. As many are now finding out, however, there was tremendous leaking, lying and corruption at the highest levels of the FBI, Justice & State. #DrainTheSwamp

The Fake News is beside themselves that McCabe was caught, called out and fired. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars was given to wife’s campaign by Crooked H friend, Terry M, who was also under investigation? How many lies? How many leaks? Comey knew it all, and much more!

The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC, and improperly used in FISA COURT for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!

He’s right. As we and many others have pointed out many times, there is no proper predicate for Mueller’s purported investigation. There was never a crime in the first place. Mueller was improperly given a general mandate to poke around and see if he could find someone to indict, for anything, or worse yet, trick someone into committing an indictable offense. The Mueller investigation is a final insult to the rule of law that was bequeathed to us, in effect, by the outgoing, corrupt Obama administration.

If anything needs to be investigated, it is the multiple crimes and improper actions of the the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, including but not limited to their collusion with Russians to sway the 2016 presidential election–an effort that, happily, failed.

If Mueller had any integrity, he would announce that his team of rabid pro-Democrat partisans has not been able to find a hint of any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia–which was the point of his investigation, to the extent that it had any coherent basis–and shut his investigation down. He won’t do that, of course. The time has not yet come to fire Mueller, perhaps, but the president is right to call him out.

Last month I was interviewed by a Dutch journalist who was passing through town about what it is like to be an inmate. . . I mean, a professor at a place like Berkeley. The resulting article in Elsevier Weekblad is in Dutch, which I don’t read at all, and in any case, most of the article is behind a subscription paywall. The headline, “Conservatieve hoogleraar: ‘Ook impopulaire ideeën moeten bespreekbaar zijn’,” apparently translates: “Conservative professor: ‘Unpopular ideas must also be discussed’.” Apparently the Dutch word for “professor” is “hoogleraar,” which I rather like. I’m going to put it on my business card from now on.

Steven Hayward (59), one of the few conservative professors at the University of Berkeley, sees freedom of speech at risk. “Speaking of speakers, that does not solve anything at all.”

That last sentence doesn’t really make sense, but I’ll roll with it. (I think what I was trying to say is that calls merely for “free speech” are insufficient, because we need to get at the ideological rot at universities before this problem will change.)

Meanwhile, the comments to the article are not behind a paywall, and the Google translate rendering of some of them are quite interesting—though you need to make due allowance for the imperfections of the translations—and suggest the article was sensible, or at least sympathetic to me:

Good, smart guy. It is all too ridiculous for words, all those long left toes and hurt souls. For decades, they themselves have insulted and cheated on more conservative people, and then suddenly they are ridiculously occupied with alleged racism or are faced with intolerant religions. Many Muslims must have NOs of Christians or dissenters, but do you think there is a critical word from the left? No, they’ll join them. Just ridiculous. For years, the Red, Left, Atheist people have had to insult or ridicule ecclesiastical or conservative compatriots, usually behind the backs, and with VARA and VPRO also openly on TV. And then they want to become an advocate of intolerant groups and of people who come here to benefit from the labor of others? How hypocritical can still be left?

What a wonderful article! In the Netherlands we work completely and nobody knows how to name a dark or tinted person. You can not be against the theory of evolution or against abortion and certainly not be a housemother who wants to raise her children herself. Enter the conversation, you can learn a lot from that.

Freedom of speech is not for frightened people. Unfortunately, the current generation of young people consists mainly of frightened people who do not want to be hurt.

I have worked for 40 years at various Dutch universities. For years there has been a rich tradition to make it impossible for scientists to work on ideological grounds. The University of Amsterdam is the worst in that regard. That is where relative non-valeurs are appointed as professors if they are left enough, while decent social scientists take their research time away if their research does not fit into the prevailing multicultural ideology. For a while it was not as bad as during the “cultural revolution” but it seems to come back to the rise of identity politics.